If your home has an infestation problem, addressing it should be top priority. Since thorough pest-control can be expensive, though, it could cross your mind to try taking things into your hands — you could look at a couple of instruction videos on YouTube, go to a home improvement center to buy the materials you need, and try driving out the pests running around your home, all by yourself.
It’s easy to overlook the fact that there is an expertise gap involved. Not only do you stand to not get to the root of the problem, you can end up exposed to dangerous chemicals, as well.
You probably won’t do a thorough inspection
It’s easy to tell yourself that you can learn most of what you need through reading a few articles and viewing a few videos. It can be hard to find an article or video, though, that goes through the 50 or 60 areas that you need to inspect before you begin work freeing your home of pests.
Even if you do find such thorough instructions, you could find it impossible to do everything that was needed. For instance, checking every opening leading into your house – gutters, drains, pipes, AC vents, conduit pipes, ventilation passages and so on — can take a long time. You could also find it taxing to check for every sign of infestation, from insect wings to smells and droppings.
You could end up making it worse
Pest infestations are often localized to specific areas of homes – a specific floor or even simply a room or two on a floor. When you try getting rid of pests, you can overlook the possibility that when attacked, they tend to flee to other areas of the house. You can end up turning what could be a simple, single-room extermination project into something that covers your entire house.
It’s hard to get all the materials needed
Whether you’re renting or buying, arranging for all the materials that you need can be expensive. You need more than the right pesticides and applicators. You need dams that can keep pests from moving to other parts of the house, exhaustive safety equipment and measurement equipment. If you could arrange for all of it, you would end up with a bill that was much larger than what any professional exterminator would charge you.
You can’t know how to protect children and pets
The chemicals used in many extermination processes are powerful enough to cause serious, lasting harm to pets and children. It isn’t even enough to send everyone out for the duration of the procedure. These chemicals can hang in the atmosphere for days.
You don’t see that an exterminator is a hunter
If you have an ant problem, you need to know what time of the day to go after them – nighttime is best for carpenter ants, for instance. Spraying ants that you see is another problem. All ants come from a colony. If you only attack what you see, you will typically succeed in getting no more than 5% of all ants in your home. Instead, you need to use baiting techniques.
If you have a mouse problem, setting a trap in the middle of the room will never succeed. Mice being timid creatures, tend to avoid open spaces. Setting traps in hidden places is a much better idea. Just as with any hunter, getting rid of pests needs great knowledge of the habits of each kind of target
The DIY pest control industry thrives on the hope that people don’t know the difference in the results they get when they try a project while poorly equipped in every way. Most people understand on their own, though, once they’ve tried the DIY approach a few times.
